I'm Nobody: Eve Sedgwick After Death

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would
have been 63 today. Four years have passed since her death, but her
absence is felt more, not less, with each. More than ever
Sedgwick’s writing generates further writing and thinking from
those who engage with it.

Sedgwick once said about reading affect theorist Silvan Tomkins:
“I often get tired when I’m learning a lot.” Her writing has the
same effect—calming and invigorating—generative and tireless even
if also sometimes tiring. In her posthumous collection,
The Weather In Proust (2011), Sedgwick remarks that one form
of antinormative reading can lead to many other types of
theorizing—this is exactly how I feel about Sedgwick’s work.
Forever against foreclosure, Sedgwick and the fact of her death is
still something we’re coming to terms with. It’s difficult to think
that she’s not alive.

Some know her as the academic who titled an MLA essay “Jane
Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” which has become something of a
shorthand for “LOL academics” in the Times. (Roger
Rosenblatt, without naming the author, listed it as an example
of “academic idiocy” that was “hair-raising”; Christopher
Hitchens paraphrased the title “only slightly,” by which I mean
not at all slightly.) To those that throw the title around without
reading the essay, though, lulz are on you. “Jane Austen and the
Masturbating Girl” looks precisely at the act that journalism was
accusing it of ignorantly enacting.

As Sedgwick later noted:

[T]he literal-minded and censorious metaphor that labels any
criticism one doesn’t like, or doesn’t understand, with the
would-be-damning epithet ‘mental masturbation,” actually refers to
a much vaster, indeed foundational open secret about how hard it is
to circumscribe the vibrations of the highly relational but, in
practical terms, solitary pleasure and adventure of writing
itself.

One’s first encounter with Sedgwick’s writing seems significant,
for reading Sedgwick gives one the intense sensation of being
known—she is the most generous, enabling thinker. While students of
the 90s likely first came to Sedgwick by way of Between Men
(1985) or Epistemology of the Closet (1990), these days,
it’s just as likely that one will discover her through her later
work on affect theory.

“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”—with its
smashing Carly Simon reference—was my first Sedgwick essay. I
remember beginning by reading it on my computer, until partway
through when printing it became a necessity because there was too
much to annotate and underline. By the end, I only had exclamation
marks and hearts as marginalia. It’s an essay, like all Sedgwick
essays, to be returned to, and this part continues to break my
heart wide open each time:

Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also
be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to
experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively
positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects
she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize
that the future may be different from the present, it is also
possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly
relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in
turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually
did.

When Sedgwick wrote Epistemology of the Closet (the book
from her earlier work that would most significantly go on to shape
gay and lesbian studies), “queer” was hardly part of any
conversation—mainstream, academic, or otherwise. At least, not in
the way that we understand “queer” now in reference to Queer
Theory. (The word appears only twice in the entirety of the book.)
Instead, Sedgwick called hers an “antihomophobic theory”—phrasing
that might strike us now as restrictive, though her theory was
anything but. Throughout the remarkable document, she makes a point
to repeat the ambition of her argument—Epistemology of the
Closet will be overly inclusive in its thinking so as to open
up the conversation to further inquiry:

I’ve wanted the book to be inviting (as well as imperative) but
resolutely non-algorithmic. A point of the book is not to know how
far its insights and projects are generalizable, not to be able to
say in advance where the semantic specificity of these issues gives
over to (or: itself structures?) the syntax of a “broader” or more
abstractable critical project. In particular, the book aims to
resist in every way it can the deadening pretended knowingness by
which the chisel of modern homo/heterosexual definitional crisis
tends, in public discourse, to be hammered most fatally home.

Sedgwick not only hoped but urged others to intervene in her
thinking as a way of moving forward—either by expanding upon,
departing from, or rejecting entirely. And they did! Queer and
sexuality studies has radically flourished since the publication of
Epistemology, though, as the book emphatically stated:
“People are different from each other.” (Let’s just think about
that for a moment.)

Queer theory, which Ms. Sedgwick developed along with Judith
Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a
prism through which scholars examine literary texts.

It gets worse, and it continues after death. And though we have
few words for “racism as criticism” Bruce Bawer, remember when he
waxed ignorant about Sedgwick in his 2012 book? This is all
obviously anti-intellectual bullshit of the highest order.

We need to keep making space for the different, and Sedgwick,
especially, knew the virtue of returning and rereading—of changing
one’s mind. In a 1999 interview,
Sedgwick remarked on the difference between what she categorized as
knowing and realizing:

It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t
move at the speed of your cognition… That it could take you a year
to really know something that you intellectually believe in a
second… how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take,
or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.

And if reading Between Men or Epistemology jars us
somewhat back to the eighties, Sedgwick also proves the exception
to the rule (perhaps being the least reactionary of all radical
theorists from then, and certainly not rooted in sex positivism).
She made a crucial intervention—in feminism, in antihomophobic
studies, in scholarship—that was needed then, and remains relevant
(and still needed!) today:

If it is still in important respects the master-canon it
nevertheless cannot now escape naming itsef with every syllable
also a particular canon, a canon of mastery, in this case of
men’s mastery over, and over against, women. Perhaps never again
need women—need, one hopes, anybody—feel greeted by the Norton
Anthology of mostly white men’s Literature with the implied
insolent salutation, “I’m nobody. Who are you?”

In 1998—just over a decade before her death, and a few years
after the recurrence of her breast cancer—Sedgwick published a
lyrical essay in the prestigious academic journal Critical
Inquiry about her searching therapy sessions. The piece is
titled “A Dialogue on Love,” and is spaced almost poetically
(Sedgwick started out as an aspiring poet), where she reiterates
conversations with her therapist:

What I’m proudest of, I guess, is having a life where work and
love are impossible to tell apart. Most of my academic work is
about gay men, so it might seem strange to you that I would say
that—not being a man, not even, I don’t think, being gay. But it’s
still true. The work is about sex and love and desire, to
begin with—like your work I suppose—so it’s almost bound to be
involving at that intimate level. But beyond that, even—Oh, where
to start!